ERC Consolidator Grant for Clemens Plaschka
Clemens Plaschka, Senior Group Leader at the IMP, has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon Europe Excellent Science scheme. His project on the fate control of messenger RNA (mRNA) will be supported with funding over the next five years.
Messenger RNA is essential for transferring genetic information from DNA to protein, a process that requires tightly orchestrated steps to ensure that only functional mRNAs (messenger RNAs) are expressed while faulty ones are degraded. How cells distinguish between functional and faulty mRNAs, and decide their fate, has remained unclear.
Clemens Plaschka's project, FATERNA – Fate control of human mRNA, will use advanced structural biology techniques, including cryo-electron microscopy, tomography, protein crosslinking, and super-resolution imaging, to visualise key intermediates of mRNPs—messenger ribonucleoprotein complexes. mRNPs are complexes of mRNA bound to specific proteins that guide its processing, transport, and stability, determining whether the mRNA is functional and destined for translation or marked for degradation. By specifically examining mRNA splicing and how it connects to packaging into mRNPs or mRNA decay, the project aims to reveal how cells ensure that only properly processed mRNAs reach the cytoplasm for translation, while faulty transcripts are efficiently removed. Studying the structure and dynamics of mRNPs at different stages will provide crucial insights into the molecular mechanisms that safeguard accurate gene expression.
“Receiving an ERC Consolidator Grant is a really great honour,” says Clemens Plaschka. “It allows us to explore a central question in RNA biology: how cells distinguish functional mRNAs from faulty ones and precisely control their journey from the nucleus to the cytoplasm.”
About Clemens Plaschka
Following undergraduate studies at Imperial College London, Clemens Plaschka did his doctoral research at the University of Munich and Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in the lab of Patrick Cramer. There, he studied the structural basis of gene activation. Plaschka then became a postdoctoral researcher with Kiyoshi Nagai at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, where he contributed to the mechanistic understanding of RNA processing by a large molecular machine, called the spliceosome. Plaschka joined the IMP as a Group Leader in 2018 and was promoted to Senior Group Leader in 2025. His lab uses structural, biochemical, and functional methods to study how messenger RNA is made and regulated at different stages of its life cycle. He received the Kulturpreis Bayern (2015) and Otto-Hahn Medal (2016) for his PhD thesis, an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship during his postdoc (2016), an ERC Starting Grant in 2020, and an EMBO Young Investigator Program award in 2022. Plaschka was presented with the Eppendorf Award for Young Investigators and elected to the Young Academy of Austrian Sciences in 2024. In 2025 Plaschka was elected EMBO member.
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